[Foundation-l] [Ticket#: 126217-FW] Emily Dickinson poems

Sun Jun 5 16:14:04 UTC 2005

Sj wrote:

>At the second "Signal or Noise" conference, a museum curator stated
>explicitly that many museums consider their images of their artwork to
>be copyrightable and copyrighted; they sell postcards, posters, etc of
>those images. They spend money curating the works of art, and
>commissioning the photos, and want to be able to recoup that.  (I am
>more or less repeating verbatim arguments I heard).
>  
>
That much is true, if they are "creative works" rather than verbatim 
copies, which is the gray area.

Interestingly, not all museums follow the anti-information-dissemination 
route.  All of Greece's national museums permit free photography without 
a permit to all visitors, with the caveat that no flash is permitted (to 
avoid either damaging the pieces or irritating visitors with incessant 
flashes).

This leads to the interesting situation where Greek artifacts in Greece 
are free to photograph, but Greek artifacts stolen by colonial UK and 
France demand further tribute to have photographs taken of them!

-Mark